What is a current concern regarding the advancement of quantum computing?

By now, most people have heard that quantum computing is a revolutionary technology that leverages the bizarre characteristics of quantum mechanics to solve certain problems faster than regular computers can. Those problems range from the worlds of mathematics to retail business, and physics to finance. If we get quantum technology right, the benefits should lift the entire economy and enhance U.S. competitiveness. The promise of quantum computing was first recognized in the 1980s yet remains unfulfilled. Quantum computers are exceedingly difficult to engineer, buildand program. As a result, they are crippled by errors in the form of noise, faultsand loss of quantum coherence, which is crucial to their operation and yet falls apart before any nontrivial program has a chance to run to completion. This loss of coherence (called decoherence), caused by vibrations, temperature fluctuations, electromagnetic waves and other interactions with the outside environment, ultimately destroys the exotic quantum properties of the computer. Given the current pervasiveness of decoherence and other errors, contemporary quantum computers are unlikely to return correct answers for programs of even modest execution time. While competing technologies and competing architectures are attacking these problems, no existing hardware platform can maintain coherence and provide the robust error correction required for large-scale computation. A breakthrough is probably several years away. The billion...

Quantum computing is defined as a computational technology that uses the principles of quantum mechanics such as entanglement, superposition, and interference to process, store, and manipulate large amounts of data and perform complex calculations for conventional computing systems and supercomputers to fathom. This article explains quantum computing, its working, importance, and applications. Table of Contents • • • • Quantum computing refers to a computational technology that uses the principles of quantum mechanics such as entanglement, superposition, and interference to process, store and manipulate large amounts of data and perform complex calculations for conventional computing systems and supercomputers to fathom . Today’s ordinary computers run on chips that use bits for computations. These bits take either of the two values–zero or one–where zero represents the ‘off’ position, and one represents the ‘on’ position. Several such bits that reveal a combination of ones and zeroes are the fundamental units of every website, app, or photograph we use or access. While bits are convenient to use, they do not essentially disclose that our universe’s nature beyond just the on and off conditions. Uncertainty is intrinsic to our world. However, even the most powerful supercomputers today cannot process this uncertainty, thereby giving rise to a computing void. The uncertainty factor came to light over the last century when scientists discovered that physical laws do not apply...

Key points • Quantum technologies are expected to bring $6 billion and 19,400 jobs into the Australian economy by 2045. • Australia has a chance right now to develop quantum technologies in an inclusive and ethical way. • It’s important that everyone, from the boardroom to the classroom, is aware of and prepared for quantum technologies. Released in May 2023, builds on decades of pioneering research. It will tap into a $1 billion fund, to help generate commercial outcomes and position the country as a world leader in this field. Quantum computers will be orders of magnitude more powerful than the classical computers we use today. These technologies will be able to solve a whole different class of complex problems. They will revolutionise banking and finance, healthcare, infrastructure, and the way we communicate. For example, quantum computing could completely change how medicines are developed. They could simulate how drugs act on the body with impressive detail. This powerful technology could even help doctors predict the side-effects of new medicines before they even go to trial. But the stakes are high. And the risks are as big as the rewards. Now is the time to be tackling quantum’s ethical quandaries. Risks and rewards Dr Manolo Per is a quantum expert in our Data61 Business Unit. "Even the most powerful computers we use today would take thousands of years to break or weaken the encryptions that keep our personal data safe online," Manolo said. “But that a quantum co...

In 2019, researchers at Google Silicon Valley infighting aside, the hype around Google’s claim of quantum supremacy highlights what some have called a What are Quantum Computers? Quantum computers are life-size representations of composite quantum systems. Whereas classical computers process information by sequentially flipping digital switches representing 0s and 1s, quantum computers use units called qubits that represent multiple values simultaneously. Because they don’t need to process information sequentially, qubits can perform calculations significantly faster than bits, which can only do so using discrete values. Quantum information scientists, then, attempt to entangle as many qubits as possible, and when they are successful, quantum computers’ processing power increases exponentially. One problem, however, is that disturbances among entangled qubits can cause the whole system to fall apart. The characteristics that make quantum systems powerful also makes them delicate. This phenomenon, which scientists call Opportunities and Risks for National Security Because of their sensitivity to environmental disturbances, quantum computers today are highly unstable and must be held in expensive refrigerators cooled to near-absolute zero temperatures. At 70 qubits, today’s machines also fall far short of the For one, quantum computing can augment artificial intelligence/machine learning. Quantum technology can process and spot patterns in data more rapidly than classical ma...

• Share to Facebook • Share to Twitter • Share to Linkedin A new generation of computer technology is on the horizon, which many think will eventually increase the computing power available to humanity by factors of thousands or possibly even millions. If this happens, it could vastly increase the speed at which we can carry out many vital tasks, such as discovering and testing new drugs or understanding the impact of climate change. However, as well as big leaps forward in what we are able to do with computers, they also require us to face up to a new set of problems, specifically around the threats they pose to security and encryption. And some people think that, in fact, quantum computers may never be useful at all due to their complexity and the limited amount of tasks at which they have been shown to be superior to classical computer technology. Editor Like everything involving the quantum (sub-atomic) domain, quantum computing isn’t the easiest concept to get your head around. Fundamentally, the term describes a new (or future) generation of super-fast computers that process information as “qubits” (quantum bits) rather than the regular bits – ones and zeroes – of classical computing. Classical computers are really just much more sophisticated versions of pocket calculators – they are based on electrical circuits and switches that can be either on (one) or off (zero). By stringing lots of these ones and zeroes together, they can store and process any information. How...

1 2 Quantum computers are better at guessing, new study demonstrates Researchers leverage techniques to manage error accumulation, demonstrating the potential of quantum computing in the error-prone NISQ era Date: June 5, 2023 Source: University of Southern California Summary: Researchers have demonstrated a quantum speedup over the most efficient classical computer algorithm possible for what is believed to be the first time. The accomplishment was performed on an IBM Montreal Quantum Falcon r4 27-qubit device. Share: Daniel Lidar, the Viterbi Professor of Engineering at USC and Director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology, and first author Dr. Bibek Pokharel, a Research Scientist at IBM Quantum, achieved this quantum speedup advantage in the context of a "bitstring guessing game." They managed strings up to 26 bits long, significantly larger than previously possible, by effectively suppressing errors typically seen at this scale. (A bit is a binary number that is either zero or one). Quantum computers promise to solve certain problems with an advantage that increases as the problems increase in complexity. However, they are also highly prone to errors, or noise. The challenge, says Lidar, is "to obtain an advantage in the real world where today's quantum computers are still 'noisy.'" This noise-prone condition of current quantum computing is termed the "NISQ" (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era, a term adapted from the RISC architecture used...

Quantum Computer courtesy of IBM Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have demonstrated a quantum speedup over the most efficient classical computer algorithm possible for what is believed to be the first time. The accomplishment, which was published in the American Physical Society’s flagship journal Physical Review Letters, was performed on an IBM Montreal Quantum Falcon r4 27-qubit device. Daniel Lidar, the Viterbi Professor of Engineering at USC and Director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology, and first author Bibek Pokharel, a Research Scientist at IBM Quantum, achieved this quantum speedup advantage in the context of a “bitstring guessing game.” They managed strings up to 26 bits long, significantly larger than previously possible, by effectively suppressing errors typically seen at this scale. (A bit is a binary number that is either zero or one). Quantum computers promise to solve certain problems with an advantage that increases as the problems increase in complexity. However, they are also highly prone to errors, or noise. The challenge, says Lidar, is “to obtain an advantage in the real world where today’s quantum computers are still ‘noisy.’” This noise-prone condition of current quantum computing is termed the “NISQ” (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era, a term adapted from the RISC architecture used to describe classical computing devices. Thus, any present demonstration of quantum speed advantage necessitates noi...

(7 pages) Flip a coin. Heads or tails, right? Sure, once we see how the coin lands. But while the coin is still spinning in the air, it’s neither heads nor tails. It’s some probability of both. This grey area is the simplified foundation of quantum computing. Digital computers have been making it easier for us to process information for decades. But quantum computers are poised to take computing to a whole new level. Here’s how it works: classical computing, the technology that powers your laptop and smartphone, is built on bits. A bit is a unit of information that can store either a zero or a one. By contrast, quantum computing is built on quantum bits, or qubits, which can store zeros and ones. Qubits can represent any combination of both zero and one simultaneously—this is called a superposition. When classical computers solve a problem with multiple variables, they must conduct a new calculation every time a variable changes. Each calculation is a single path to a single result. Quantum computers, however, have a larger working space, which means they can explore a massive number of paths simultaneously. This possibility means that quantum computers can be But the first real proof that quantum computers could handle problems too complicated for classical computers didn’t arrive until 2019, when Google announced that its quantum computer had made a major breakthrough: it solved a problem in 200 seconds that would have taken a classical computer 10,000 years. Although th...